The San Juan City Hall (Photo from the the city’s Facebook account)
MANILA, Philippines — The number of active COVID-19 cases in San Juan City has risen by 133 in a span of just 10 days, its mayor said Thursday.
San Juan Mayor Francis Zamora said the city has 196 active cases as of Wednesday, March 10.
“Last Feb.. 17, we were down to just 30 active cases and then Mar. 1, we had 63. So from Mar. 1 to Mar. 10, we had an increase of 133 cases and of course this is very, very high compared to what we’ve been experiencing in the past few months, in fact we expected a surge during the holidays, which did not happen,” he said in an interview on ABS-CBN News Channel.
“Now, the past few days, it has been increasing and this prompted me to reinstate our curfew last Mar. 9 and I have again reminded our chief of police and all our law enforcers to be stricter in terms of the implementation of all health standards,” he added.
The city government reimposed its curfew hours, which will be from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Zamora said the curfew will serve as a “psychological reminder” to residents that the threat of the pandemic still persists.
Mayor Francis Zamora. FILE PHOTO
“The implementation of the curfew is basically a psychological reminder to people that ‘Hey, guys, we’re experiencing a spike, please change your mindset, do not relax, do not be confident just because the vaccine rollout has started’,” he said.
“So we want to change the mindset of people, reminding them that we are still under the pandemic and we have to follow all minimum standards. At the same time It’s our duty also to trace where the spike is coming from,” he added.
According to Zamora, the Metro Manila Council (MMC) will be meeting with the Department of Health (DOH) and OCTA Research regarding the spike in COVID-19 cases.
“We will listen and understand if the new variants are the cause of the spike,” Zamora said.
On Wednesday, the Philippines logged 2,886 new COVID-19 infections, which pushed the number of active cases to 44,470 and increased the country’s case total to 603,308.
Of the number, 546,293 have already recovered while 12,545 have died.